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Post #3398036
2026-06-23 02:07 UTC
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net
> And it immediately implies the fundamental problem: the app makers are therefore largely not eating their own dogfood. This causes problems that have been widely explored.
I honestly feel like we have a reverse problem: the app makers don't actually understand computers or user interfaces, and the people who designed the original GUIs and knew the WHY behind everything have left or retired.
Like, I'm an affable guy. I don't like harping on #UIDesign all the time.
But our modern UI Design is absolute dogshit, if you'll forgive a little vulgarity (fairly rare for me).
It's bad enough that everything is created with 23-year-old eyes in mind, but even basic usability has suffered dramatically in the past fifteen years.
If I had a money tree and a fountain of youth, I'd go back to Uni (AGAIN 🤣) actually get my C.S. degree, and major on UI Design and be the most annoying forking UI Gadfly in all the nine realms.
Replies (1)
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@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz @synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net
Regarding modern UIs, I will say that I'm very happy that search has won over hierarchical menus in general*, particularly for launching applications. I love dmenu/rofi/wofi/fuzzel and even KRunner when I'm on my work machine.
When digging through work folders that are synced with the cloud and have hundreds of thousands of files (in well-organized, but still deeply nested directories), I have my own search menu system I came up using just simple old find, grep, and zstd which is actually faster and more reliable (and much, much less resource-intensive) than the search facilities provided by Gnome or KDE and their complicated daemons and databases.
* I don't mean "hamburger menus" vs. hierarchical menus, though. Those are for the birds. 😄
Open ##3398034